#Bring Back our Girls

This weekend we will celebrate Mother’s Day here in the U.S., but as I read the MSN headlines and look around on Facebook and twitter, it’s impossible as a mom, not to feel sad for all the mothers in Nigeria who have had their girls taken from them recently.

You’ve had to see the campaigns, the hashtag activism, it’s everywhere and it’s heartbreaking!

I had a nightmare once that stuck with me. I opened my door to our backyard one beautiful and very normal day, to call Ella in from playing. My focus was so keenly on her to my left, that I didn’t realize as I called her name that a bulky man was standing to my right talking to her, in our yard! Before I could say anything to him, the stranger darted off leaving our gate swinging and shouting “I couldn’t get her” to someone in the distance.

It was frightening to think of how close I came to losing my daughter, right from our own backyard, a place I felt was the equivalence of protection.

But I soon shook the fear however, because of a few reasons, that dream was set in my childhood home- I don’t even have a fenced in yard! And because of that, I tend to never leave the kids out alone. Also, it’s unlikely Ella would ever be targeted, like she was in my dream. I’m fortunate.

But those mothers who are now victims of that terrorist group who took their daughters are actually living their own abduction nightmare.

And although there are some who believe all our sharing, tweeting and blogging about this issue is doing nothing more than making noise, as in this Washington Post article, I want to believe that there is power in our numbers and our voices when lent in unison to an issue.

Maybe I can’t physically go to Nigeria and retrieve those girls. I wouldn’t know where to begin, but if our noise collects, with our petitions, rallies and protests, becoming loud enough to annoy this terrorist group and others like them, maybe we can show them that we are all collectively motivated to seek justice against them and hopefully, next time our children won’t be so easily taken.

It reminds me of an African Proverb I once heard, once the lion has a historian, then the hunter will no longer be the hero.